The Greatest Peace Movement of Them All Remember
Grenier, Richard
Richard Grenier THE GREATEST PEACE MOVEMENT OF THEM ALL Remember Brest-Litovsk (the Russians do). Daily, sometimes hourly, Lenin ad-dressed the crowds of thousands from a raised platform in front...
...This was the same result obtained by Trotsky's Bolshevik predecessor at the negotiations, who had been stunned...
...The only people the Russian Army was good at killing now were its Own officers...
...Bella Ab/ug, Michael Harrington, and Ron Dcllums...
...They had no navy...
...A German scholar decided that such a thing had not occurred since a conflict between the ancient Greeks and the Scythians...
...The Germans listened, patiently, thinking that this was his swan song, that he had no choice but to give in...
...The Times wrote that in American politics this could well be a policy of "self-destruct," and that "at least, it would imply a profound change in the membership'of the movement to whom it appeals...
...Trotsky, outraged, fulminated again...
...We have had others since...
...Most prominent French pacifists of the period went over to the Nazis...
...He even inveighed against slogans and dema-goguery...
...Berlin at last answered Petrograd...
...Who had ever heard of a unilateral declaration of peace...
...The Germans held thousands of square kilometers of Russian territory...
...The game will be over...
...Many of the public figures in the West who are speaking out on peace and disarmament are doing so out of "naivete," "political fashion," or "insufficient knowledge of the issues," he said...
...Told by Bolshevik agents that their commander was responsible for the "prolongation of the war," his troops mutinied and a mob of soldiery dragged the chief of staff from his headquarters and beat him to death, a sailor from Petrograd pumping two bullets into his body...
...Soviet plain-clothes police prevented them from entering...
...Just a few days before, Lenin, in one of his first acts as head of government, had issued his "Peace Decree," calling for peace on the basis of no annexations, no indemnities, and self-determination...
...Writing even after the flurry of fuzzily worded recent state and county referenda calling for a "verifiable freeze," the New York Times, in a rare burst of clarity, said that one of the likely destinies of the "freeze" movement (compared to which most bishops are extremists) is that it might come to resemble West Germany's "Greens," perceived by the public as systematically hostile to the West...
...And since the peace movement has drawn out such an ecstatic crowd of unsophisticated new supporters, it is worth recalling the vicissitudes and fate of earlier peace movements, particularly the most spectacular of them all, the forgotten Russian peace movement of 1917...
...Peace...
...Lenin, despite the enraged charges of his enemies on the Right—and sometimes on the Left—was obviously not a German agent...
...Russian troops were crossing no man's land with bottles of vodka to fraternize with the Germans, a movement strongly supported by the German High Command— although officially condemned so as not to compromise it...
...As she was in a constant rage at interference in her programs by the president for news of her network, I asked her what she would do if, perchance, the Russians did do something to her...
...It was the greatest peace- movement in modern history...
...Can you give me anything but prattle and pasteboard figures...
...A wild debate broke out in Petrograd...
...Oh," she said bravely, "then I'd fight...
...He threw the dice once more, and lost...
...With what were they to fight...
...Trotsky had outsmarted the Germans...
...He had scornfully rejected their odious terms, but had still brought peace...
...Here, too, finicky ethical distinctions were lost...
...For, as Sakharov and every other Russian knows, the Iron Law of Peace Movements is that the nation that has one—if it carries the day—loses...
...Which is a perfectly tenable position, you might think, for a pacifist of purist hue...
...And the Russian peace movement, and its consequence, Brest-Litovsk, were forgotten, at least in the West...
...To thunderous applause from the new Congress of Soviets, he declared that he would issue an ultimatum to Berlin...
...Andrei Sakharov recently wrote a letter to the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, which—in a blaze of insouciance utterly worthy of that organization—chose to hold its annual conference in Warsaw in August on the second anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, just in time to breathe inspirationally of Jaruzel-ski's tear gas...
...It brought the Congress to its feet, roaring, a hurricane of sound, some singing the Internationale...
...I think it only logical to feel, when the German panzer divisions came smashing through Belgium, that Gandhi, still abjuring violence, should, consistent with his principles, have advised the French to commit collective suicide to arouse public opinion in Britain...
...What he did most fervently, however, was to proclaim Harvard's mission to "inform the people," since it was an informed public opinion that had demanded a solution to such earlier American problems as slavery, child labor, and segregated lunch counters...
...They cabled Petrograd an ultimatum...
...Friends of Earth, liberation theologists, devotees of solar energy, eaters of natural food, not to mention great numbers of pure-hearted lovers of life...
...television network, quite swept away by her leaping desire for peace, told me during the recent seizure of nuclear terror that she "wouldn't mind" if the Russians took over Western Europe, or even America, provided (she added prudently) that they didn't do anything to her...
...Vast antiwar demonstrations filled the streets of Petrograd, clashing bloodily with police and army...
...Clayburgh offered her ideas recently at a public gathering...
...They have never been forgotten in the Soviet Union...
...But Lenin—if by only a small margin—held him off...
...His advice to Europe's Jews, for example, a key problem in the moral quagmire of the time, was highly tonic...
...They were Draconian...
...Which was an interesting spiritual development, wouldn't you say, from pacifist to Nazi...
...The Decree passed unanimously...
...This is a rough summary of the state of play between the American and Soviet nuclear peace movements: half a million virtuous Americans having the time of their lives in New York, and a dozen or so grim Russians harried by the police in Moscow...
...The Germans, were already advancing on Petrograd...
...For, if Gandhi carried his thinking further than most pacifists, he did not carry it quite through to the end...
...For a time, and for a time only, his purposes and those of Germany were simply congruent...
...it was advancing on Helsinki...
...The army was now in a state of anarchy...
...It would not fight...
...As World War II approached...
...Sailors were scurrying off Russian warships in port, abandoning them, too...
...They would take care of all this self-determination themselves...
...They must fight...
...They must give it up...
...Judas...
...They wired back that they did not receive cabled acceptances...
...The bishops have already blamed Third World poverty on multinational corporations and the U.S...
...Nonetheless, Gandhi was a dedicated practitioner of ahimsa (nonviolence) and his views on affairs in Europe, where great armies were indeed ranged for battle, have not received the attention they deserve...
...Lenin asked...
...What did they mean by occupied by their forces...
...armored brigade besotted in the hovels of New Canaan, surrendering to the invader in droves, while sailors from the Anacostia Naval Air Station storm the Pentagon and drag out General Vessey and shoot him in the head and our new Commissar for War, Reverend William Sloane Coffin, capitulates to the enemy on the blood-soaked ground of Tavern on the Green...
...Daily, sometimes hourly, Lenin ad-dressed the crowds of thousands from a raised platform in front of the palace of Kshesinskaya, the celebrated ballet dancer...
...The German Army was swallowing Russia, the Ukraine...
...The Germans would not dare attack...
...A lesser mind might not have seen this, but such a noble act on the part of the Jews would "arouse" world public opinion...
...It had been told that peace had come, that the Germans were brothers...
...It had "the charm of novelty," wrote the general...
...He did not complain that he didn't have time for all this, as had Clayburgh...
...Kerensky, minister for war of the Provisional Government which had suc-ceeded the Czar, was given to flights of frenzied oratory, impassioned exhortations to continue the war against Germany to save the new social democracy...
...And we will know they've won...
...The crowds roared their approval...
...Russians were surrendering by the thousand, by the battalion, by the regiment...
...Richard Grenier is film critic for Commentary...
...Peace," moreover, was an issue capable of arousing tremendous popular support...
...Their prosaic reading of the situation was as follows: Germany had at its feet a prostrate enemy, which had just declared it would not even defend itself...
...From the beginning its goal had been to get Russia out of the war...
...Peace...
...Yes, indeed...
...Their goal was of unusual simplicity...
...The German generals did not even wait for the 48 hours to expire...
...If they attacked, the German workers would rise up and overthrow their masters...
...After the war, after Auschwitz, after Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), after the Final Solution, reminded of his advice to the Jewish people, Gandhi said, well, they died anyway, didn't they...
...Winston Churchill said the Germans had brought Lenin from Switzerland to Russia in a sealed train like a "plague bacillus...
...The next conflict, if it should come, is quite likely to be a war by checkmate, and its outcome is being determined right now, by these shiftings of the "nuclear balance...
...And he failed to indicate what effect he thought informing Americans about nuclear matters would have on the citizens and rulers of our presumptive adversary, the Soviet Union...
...They honored the principle of self-determination and held it to be of the greatest importance, they said, and as soon as peace came they would see to it immediately in all territories occupied by their forces...
...A Paris magazine editor, Deat produced, in the late thirties, the most renowned peace pamphlet ever written: Die For Danzig?, in which he argued passionately that it was not worth dying for Danzig, or, indeed, any place...
...When he met with the Germans and Austrians in January of 1918 at Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German armies on the Eastern Front, he berated them, gave them some examples of his fiery revolutionary oratory...
...Now they would have theirs...
...He had come to power in large measure due to his "peace platform...
...Trotsky reminded them that they had agreed to negotiate peace on the basis of no annexations and self-determination...
...Was Germany at peace or at war...
...Some ten to thirteen years ago, wrote Sakharov, there was an approximate strategic equilibrium between East and West...
...Lenin didn't believe it, but hour followed hour...
...He, first, sincerely thought that to have Russian and German soldiers killing each other in what he saw to be the sole interest of the propertied classes of one country or the other was wrong and a crime against history...
...Russia, Lenin pro-claimed, wanted peace...
...It would be one of the more glorious battles, I'm sure...
...To be fair, admiration for Trotsky's brilliance extended even to the fortress of Brest-Litovsk itself, to the German and Austrian diplomats...
...Less given to wishful thinking than some of the other Bolsheviks, Lenin knew perfectly well that if the German military overran Russia the lot of the Russian people would scarcely be improved, but, thinking all other countries were in the same state of near-collapse as Russia, he was deeply convinced that a world proletarian revolution was about to break out everywhere in weeks, perhaps days...
...The Catholic bishops I would, frankly, just as soon leave to their flock...
...During the rise of Hitler in the thirties many in the Western democracies spoke in the name of "peace," enunciating atti-tudes of appeasement which discredited the word as a slogan for decades to come...
...Their position is not only one-sided, warned Sakharov, but "dangerous...
...An executive producer of a major U.S...
...Derek Bok, speaking at Harvard's commencement exercises last June, made a much more dignified impression...
...Gandhi's chosen method for achieving independence was simply nonviolent (as has often been said, a technique that worked with Britain but would not have worked with Nazi Germany...
...And the constant drum roll was: Peace...
...That Jew was really a clever fellow...
...Berlin's view at Brest-Litovsk, pithily put by a diplomat, was that the only choice the Bolsheviks had was "what sauce they shall be eaten with," and Trotsky's oratorical fireworks and resounding "peace" proclamation led the Germans, not to soften their terms, but to stiffen them...
...And they handed Trotsky a draft treaty removing from Bolshevik control vast areas of the former Russian Empire...
...The Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets received Trotsky in a state of wild euphoria, passing unanimously a resolution approving his conduct at Brest-Litovsk...
...This was not to be a characteristic of the Soviet state in later decades, but in that winter of 1918 there were quite a few people answering this description in the ruling councils of the infant Bolshevik state in Petrograd...
...When the Russian Provisional Government attempted its last offensive against the Germans in July 1917, regiment after regiment mutinied and murdered its officers...
...You put a small German detachment on a railroad train with some machine-guns, then sent it ahead for 25 or 30 kilometers to the next stop, where it accepted the surrender of all the Russians...
...The population was fleeing...
...All was as the General Staff had thought...
...President Bok did not seem to notice that these earlier problems were mainly domestic U.S...
...Although cultivated, intelligent, and a great orator, his personal style was harsh and imperious, and his usual oratorical mode one of contemptuous rage...
...Checkmate...
...German spy...
...But since I have always believed, with George Orwell, that to abjure violence is a luxury which a delicate few enjoy only because others stand ready to do violence in their behalf, I wonder whether even these bishops are prepared to live in the world to which the total repudiation of deterrence would lead...
...Fighting on two fronts was bleeding them white and they wanted Russia out of the war...
...After a first round of talks under a subordinate official, Lenin sent his "temporary" foreign minister, the great Leon Trotsky himself, to negotiate peace with the Germans on the basis of the Bolshevik Peace Declaration...
...All of Russia was in a state of anarchy...
...She didn't read newspapers...
...Cora Weiss...
...A unilateral declaration of peace, or of nuclear disarmament, or of refusal to build an ABM system, or to fight, or to do anything violent or rude, is a preemptive capitulation...
...affairs...
...Even Lenin, the most guarded of the leaders, voted approval...
...Old comrades shrieked at him, howled, "Traitor...
...The Soviet leaders, I suspect, would have sensed this even if they had never had a Brest-Litovsk, but, I can assure you, they know their Brest-Litovsk...
...Great armies were not ranged for battle...
...But Lenin, leader of a contending faction, was stolid, down to earth, his hands buried in the side pockets of an old blue jacket...
...And we will mine...
...Now there is nothing in the Marxist canon of history that will explain why a Presbyterian moralist turned U.S...
...But a lapsed pacifist, Woodrow Wilson, played his part as well, and, the war won, was among the first to insist that Germany should immediately evacuate its troops from conquered territories in the East...
...His eloquence was magnificent...
...It would be delightful if the world were otherwise, but it is not...
...And, if America had in turn been threatened, he should have advised Americans to commit collective suicide to arouse public opinion—where...
...Other Russians were fleeing pell-mell, abandoning all artillery and ammunition...
...Admiration for Trotsky, however, did not extend to the German General Staff...
...Western peace movements in all their picturesque forms and variants quite understandably appeared again...
...Another great pacifist of the period, now recalled to us in an extraordinarily timely fashion by an epic motion-picture, was Mahatma Gandhi...
...If the citizen feels that his government is hell-bent on the road to disaster, what is he to do...
...But Lenin, unperturbed, dispatched a new delegate to Brest-Litovsk, and this time the delegate signed instantly...
...Scholars still quarrel over just how much German money reached the Russian peace movement by secret channels, but the weight of evidence is" that it was by millions and millions, paying for the huge antiwar press, posters, leaflets...
...But the trick was to attain power, suffer a defeat rarely surpassed in its harshness, and yet avoid paying the bitter consequences by having a third party pull your chestnuts out of the fire...
...Those who have gotten their notion of Trotsky from Mary McCarthy, who considered him the most romantic man in modern history and ended an essay on him with "Bravo, old sport," should realize that Trotsky was not quite as sporty as all that...
...Crude, unimaginative people, perhaps, the German generals were peculiarly immune to Trotsky's dialectical brilliance...
...If our present peace movement prevails, the Russians might one day say "Check...
...So I would like to remind Gandhians—even new converts made by the movie—that, come what may, they will always have the option of significant, collective protest-suicide, which will certainly arouse public opinion in Micronesia, or wherever else there are publics disposed to have an opinion...
...For "peace" movements do not bring peace, they bring defeat...
...He would use it to attain power...
...This grand and glorious jumble of ethical schools has now taken the field again in the current nuclear weapons debate, with Quakers, Catholic bishops, Communists (with placards to prove it), and concerned citizens for a humane water-supply locking arms happily in their common struggle against nuclear war...
...Trotsky fulminated: they must not accept...
...And they will know we know...
...The war was now quite "comical," a German general wrote...
...Then they will move again and say...
...Why should they fight this war for the landlords and the factory owners...
...No, no, said the Germans politely...
...It had set new terms...
...His new novel, The Marrakesh One-Two, will be published by Houghton-Mifflin later this year...
...fumed Trotsky...
...But that is something like what happened...
...They might as well have died significantly...
...Although the Soviet press was running glowing accounts of the huge demonstration in New York, members of the miniature Russian group were arrested and charged with "hooliganism," and their spokesman was confined to a psychiatric hospital...
...Of the old Russian Empire: Finland, Estonia, Livonia, Courland, Lithuania, and Poland became independent states under German "protection"—as did the Ukraine, which had been part of Russia since the seventeenth century...
...It has been said that the Bolsheviks didn't even need to seize power, they just picked it up...
...Although there are thousands ot high-minded and eminent persons from secular life who have concerned themselves actively with the nuclear peril, I will consider only two, Jill Clayburgh, the actress, and Derek Bok, president of Harvard University, who differ somewhat in educational background but whose hearts, it would seem, are in approximately the same place...
...President—to all appearances tormented by guilt at having abandoned his pacifist beliefs— should in his pursuit of a better world adamantly demand that Wilhelmine Germany disgorge all its ill-gotten gains in the East, thereby vastly increasing the chances of survival of the world's first Communist state...
...The Germans, particularly the generals, listened coolly...
...The Czar's regime had been weak and inefficient, but the present situation was simple chaos...
...They had no army...
...When Berlin received the Russian overtures for peace in late 1917, the General Staff considered its goal accomplished and immediately began stripping German divisions from the East and shipping them in massive numbers to the Western Front—where French, British, and American armies now awaited with clenched teeth the final German onslaught...
...They had a sense of humor...
...Its generals had not read as many books as Trotsky, or perhaps they had merely read different books, for they understood Thucydides: Whenever men can rule, they will...
...In Petrograd, mobs rioted, looted, there were two aborted coups...
...Gandhi's letter to Adolf Hitler, seeking to convert the Nazi leader to nonviolence, must be read to be believed...
...But, living under the menace of nuclear nightmare as we all do, I would prefer to think that none of the good Americans who have recently been protesting so earnestly for nuclear peace are Marcel Deats or even Mahatma Gandhis, but all sound Quakers, breast-feeders...
...Moreover, he was not alone...
...The Bolsheviks needn't bother their heads about it...
...Lenin's words were heard...
...But during the Vietnam war, "peace" became respectable again, although in the smug ignorance of history and the seman-tic muddle of the times it was rarely clear whether the speakers were pure pacifists (would capitulate in any war), selective pacifists (only in some), or merely people who felt war was just awful (these were the intellectual dregs as no admirer of the martial virtues from Homer on down has ever said war was a garden of delight...
...But of all the thousands of distinguished people who signed Oxford Pledges, never to take up arms for King and country—Quakers, pacifists, nature lovers, vegetarians, nudists, spiritualists (Orwell's list)—I will select only one, a Frenchman, Marcel Deat, at one time very celebrated...
...He was defeated, not surprisingly, by statesmen who had had no truck with peace movements, Clemenceau (not called "The Tiger" for nothing) and Lloyd George—both possessed of a powerful Vernichtungswille (will to annihilate) directed at Germany...
...At the front, working-class Bolshevik agents infiltrated the army in massive numbers...
...Russia seemed to have two governments, the Provisional Government of which Kerensky was now prime minister, and the Petrograd Soviet, each issuing contradictory proclamations...
...The quaintness of this example notwithstanding, the reader must not think that I am imagining a vast Soviet amphibious force wading ashore at Westport, Connecticut, with a mutinous U.S...
...Whereupon, Trotsky ended his speech with a dazzling coup de theatre: while Russia utterly rejected the German terms, which might lead one to think that the war went on, Trotsky made a unilateral declaration of peace...
...The Jews should commit collective suicide, he said...
...He did not refer to Jules Feiffer as his eminence grise...
...The Jew had had his fun...
...Again and again, he asked one question of the crowds: "What do you get from the war...
...She rarely even watched television news...
...At dawn of the second day, armies in field grey were moving forward on all fronts...
...The Revolution would come...
...The German Army in the East was stripped down, but ready to fight...
...This could not have been a secret from the Papacy...
...I should make clear that Gandhi was not properly speaking the leader of an "antiwar" movement...
...The acceptance must be delivered in written form...
...Then back on the train again: another stop, another surrender...
...Panic seized Petrograd, and Lenin cabled that he accepted the German terms...
...He and his delegation then stormed out of the conference hall at Brest-Litovsk and returned immediately to Petrograd where he was received in triumph...
...What was left of the Russian Army Was a demoralized, destitute rabble...
...She never voted, she declared...
...Russia, its Czar already overthrown and the fabric of its society grievously rent, was entering the fourth year of a terrible, "unpopular" war...
...The war is over...
...Even if the government retired to the Urals, Lenin promised, it would not survive three weeks...
...Ed Asncr...
...Germany's writ now ran from the Arctic Ocean to the Caucasus...
...At the war's end, Deat himself disappeared into thin air, and only after his death in 1955 was it revealed that he had refound his Christian faith and been hidden for his last ten years in a monastery in Italy...
...Trotsky made a scathing speech denouncing the terms of the German proposal...
...Except that when France collapsed before Nazi Germany in 1940, Deat became one of Berlin's overlords, ruling France for the Nazis with a mailed fist...
...The SS-20 missiles have changed the strategic equilibrium in Europe," he warned, "although those who take part in pacifist demonstrations seem not to notice this fact...
...To my knowledge, in the six years that remained to him, Lenin never regretted the peace movement that had brought Russia so low, and, in his own words, almost "signed the death warrant" of the Bolshevik regime...
...Germany controlled the routes to the oil of Baku, to the cotton of Central Asia, to the mountain passes of India...
...It had been promised peace...
...The generals were extremely civil...
...We will never know the course that world events would have taken if Ludendorff had been content with a German triumph in the East unprecedented since the Middle Ages, and, dealing from strength, had sought peace with the West...
...And, if Operation Sea Eion had been launched, he should have advised the British to commit collective suicide to arouse public opinion in America...
...Russia also lost much of Byelorussia and Transcaucasia, more than half of its industries, 75 percent of its coal mines, 73 percent of its iron production, 37 percent of its average crops, and no less than 44 percent of its population...
...There are people so prone to excitement on contact with exalted ideas, and so awed at the glittering edifices that language can construct, that they sometimes quite take leave of their senses...
...I would remind him, whatever else, to proceed with the most extreme circumspection, for peace movements, like wars, not only have tremendous consequences, but these consequences can be irreversible...
...The same weekend President Bok spoke in Harvard Yard, 500.000 to 700,000 Americans demonstrated in New York for a nuclear freeze—while in Russia 11 members of a week-old independent Soviet-peace movement attempted to meet in a private Moscow apartment...
...He was never in the least repentant about his advice to Jews, moreover...
...It was the famous treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Hitler's favorite treaty, and you can understand why...
...If the Russians did not accept the German terms within 48 hours, the temporary armistice was at an end...
...So Lenin was patently not a German agent, but as for Marcel Deat, perhaps only his confessor knew for sure...
...I would not want it thought that the German generals were witless brutes...
...When Kerensky fled the Winter Palace and Lenin claimed supreme power, General Dukhonin, the chief of staff, refused to accept his authority...
...Lenin hurried off a signed document, but days passed without an answer from Brest-Litovsk—as the German Army advanced unopposed...
...Word reached the front that peasants were seizing the lands of the landlords back home, and peasant-soldiers threw down their arms and deserted by the hundreds of thousands...
...then answered it himself: "Wounds, suffering, hunger, and death...
...So I leave the bishops with the prospect of preaching to a congregation made up of William Kunstler...
...He and the other Bolsheviks carried this thinking so far as to conceive of the post of foreign minister as merely a temporary one—because tomorrow all national boundaries would disappear, and the world would be one...
...But the Soviet Union had used detente to carry out a "very substantial" build-up of its missile arsenal, as well as of its army, navy, and air force...
...I will not pretend that this cannot lead to a quandary...
...But what she brought to the question of peace was her "humanity," she announced, and offered the audience some Great Truths about nuclear warfare she had gleaned from Jonathan Schell, as well as from Jules Feiffer, who seems to be a nuclear strategist of some standing...
...In conjunction with a parallel treaty signed at Bucharest, Brest-Litovsk granted Germany economic concessions clear across Russia, to whose raw materials it now had unlimited access...
...Peace has come...
...India's drive for independence from the British Empire implied no war, nor threat of war...
...The bishops, who in the draft of a pastoral letter debated at their recent council in Washington seem to be veering sharply toward the pure pacifist position, are of course right in saying that nuclear weapons have given war an entirely new and alarming scale, making it far harder to satisfy the Church's criteria for a just war: "discrimination" and "proportion...
...Like many great strategists, however, he was a gambler and went for absolute victory...
...But this time Trotsky was ready, and he did something so dramatic and so clever that it had never been done before, and might never be done again...
...Men embraced each other, sobbed like children, mumbled incredulously, "The war is over...
...If the German proletariat realizes that we are ready to consider all offers of peace," he declared, "revolution will break out in Germany...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
